Public Family Trees/Vanderbilt/Cornelius Vanderbilt III
1873 - 1942 · Male · New York, New York, United States
Son of Cornelius Vanderbilt II and Alice Claypoole Gwynne Vanderbilt
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Cornelius Vanderbilt III was an American military officer, engineer and yachtsman, the eldest surviving son of Cornelius Vanderbilt II. Born in New York City and trained at Yale in mechanical engineering, he patented improvements to locomotives and railway cars and held senior posts in the New York Central system. His marriage in 1896 to Grace Graham Wilson, made against his father's wishes, cost him his place as pri…
Born1873
Born to Cornelius Vanderbilt II, Alice Claypoole Gwynne Vanderbilt.
Family
A partnership that connects two branches of the Vanderbilt family.
Legacy
A defining role in the story of the Vanderbilt family.
Died1942
The close of a life whose connections continue through the family record.
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Gen 1 · 1794 - 1877
Cornelius Vanderbilt, known throughout his life as the Commodore, was an American shipping and railroad magnate who built the largest private fortune in the United States of his day. Born on Staten Island, New York, into a family of Dutch descent whose father worked as a boatman, he began with a single sailing barge in New York Harbour as a teenager, expanded into steamboats on the Hudson and on coastal and transatlantic routes, then moved into railroads after the Civil War, consolidating the New York Central system and building Grand Central Depot in Manhattan. He married his first cousin Sophia Johnson and, after her death, Frank Armstrong Crawford. Of his thirteen children he entrusted the fortune almost entirely to his eldest surviving son, William Henry Vanderbilt. A gift of one million dollars in 1873 founded Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
Gen 1 · 1839 - 1885
Frank Armstrong Crawford Vanderbilt was the second wife of Cornelius Vanderbilt, whom she married in 1869, and a distant cousin of his through her mother. Born in Mobile, Alabama, and given a man's name after a family friend, she was educated in the South and was some forty five years younger than her husband. She is remembered chiefly for persuading him to make the gift of one million dollars that in 1873 endowed the Central University of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in Nashville, renamed Vanderbilt University in his honour; the institution's founder, Bishop Holland McTyeire, was her kinsman. She had no children with Vanderbilt and survived him by eight years.
Gen 3 · 1849 - 1920
William Kissam Vanderbilt was an American railroad executive, thoroughbred breeder and yachtsman, the second son of William Henry Vanderbilt. Born at New Dorp on Staten Island, New York, he managed the family's railroad interests alongside his brother Cornelius Vanderbilt II before withdrawing from business to concentrate on racing in France and on collecting. With his first wife Alva Erskine Smith he built the Petit Chateau at 660 Fifth Avenue and Marble House at Newport, and used the celebrated costume ball of 1883 to force open the doors of Mrs Astor's New York society. Their children were Consuelo, Duchess of Marlborough, William Kissam Vanderbilt II and Harold Stirling Vanderbilt. After his divorce in 1895 he married Anne Harriman.
Gen 3 · 1852 - 1946
Emily Thorn Vanderbilt was a daughter of William Henry Vanderbilt and Maria Louisa Kissam and a philanthropist in New York City. She married William Douglas Sloane of the furnishings firm W. and J. Sloane in 1872, and with him built Elm Court at Lenox in the Berkshires, one of the largest shingle style houses in America. She was a principal benefactor of the Sloane Hospital for Women in New York, endowed with her husband, and of institutions at Lenox and in the city. Widowed in 1915, she married the diplomat Henry White in 1920. Sister of Cornelius Vanderbilt II, William Kissam Vanderbilt and George Washington Vanderbilt II, she lived to the age of ninety three.
Gen 3 · 1856 - 1938
Frederick William Vanderbilt was an American railroad director and yachtsman, the third son of William Henry Vanderbilt. Born at New Dorp on Staten Island, New York, and educated at Yale, he sat on the boards of more than twenty railroad companies, including the New York Central, and was reckoned the most capable investor of his generation of the family, increasing his inherited share many times over. He and his wife Louise built a Beaux Arts mansion at Hyde Park, New York, designed by McKim, Mead and White, now preserved as the Vanderbilt Mansion National Historic Site. The couple had no children, and much of his fortune passed to a niece and to Vanderbilt and Yale universities.
Gen 4 · 1877 - 1964
Consuelo Vanderbilt, Duchess of Marlborough, was an American born duchess, memoirist and social reformer, the daughter of William Kissam Vanderbilt and Alva Erskine Smith. Born in New York City, she was pressed by her mother into marrying Charles Spencer-Churchill, 9th Duke of Marlborough, in 1895, a match that brought a large Vanderbilt settlement to Blenheim Palace and made her the most famous of the American heiresses who married into the British aristocracy. In England she campaigned for prisoners' welfare and for working women and served on the London County Council. Separated from Marlborough in 1906, she married the French airman Jacques Balsan in 1921 and later wrote the memoir The Glitter and the Gold.
Gen 5 · 1897 - 1986
Flora Payne Whitney was an American art patron and museum administrator, the eldest child of the sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Harry Payne Whitney. Born in New York City, she grew up between her mother's studio world and the Whitney racing stables, and made the Whitney Museum of American Art her life's work, serving as its president and later its chairman and guiding it through the move to the Marcel Breuer building on Madison Avenue in 1966. She was engaged to Quentin Roosevelt, the youngest son of Theodore Roosevelt, who was killed in action in 1918, and afterwards married Roderick Tower and then George Macculloch Miller.
Gen 5 · 1897 - 1972
John Albert Edward William Spencer-Churchill, 10th Duke of Marlborough, was a British peer, the elder son of the 9th Duke and Consuelo Vanderbilt and therefore a grandson of William Kissam Vanderbilt. Educated at Eton, he served in the Life Guards in the First World War and again in the Second, during which Blenheim Palace, which he had inherited in 1934, was given over first to a relocated school and then to government intelligence work. He sat in the House of Lords, held county office in Oxfordshire, and worked to keep Blenheim intact by opening it more fully to visitors. He was a first cousin once removed of Winston Churchill.
Gen 5 · 1898 - 1956
Lord Ivor Charles Spencer-Churchill was a British art collector, the younger son of the 9th Duke of Marlborough and Consuelo Vanderbilt. Educated at Eton and at Christ Church, Oxford, and free of the duties that fell to his elder brother the 10th Duke, he devoted himself to modern painting, assembling a notable collection of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works that he lent to public exhibitions in London. He was close to his mother and spent long periods with her and Jacques Balsan in France. He remained a largely private figure, known chiefly within the art world, and died in 1956.
Gen 6 · b. 1967
Anderson Hays Cooper is an American broadcast journalist and author, the anchor of Anderson Cooper 360 on CNN and a correspondent for CBS's 60 Minutes. Born in New York City, the younger son of the designer Gloria Vanderbilt and the author Wyatt Emory Cooper, he is a great great great grandson of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt. He studied political science at Yale, then began reporting by carrying a camera into Burma, Vietnam and Somalia and selling the results to Channel One. He joined ABC News and then CNN, where his reporting from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 established him as one of the network's central figures. He wrote The Rainbow Comes and Goes with his mother and Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty with Katherine Howe.
Gen 2 · 1830 - 1882
Cornelius Jeremiah Vanderbilt was the younger surviving son of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt and Sophia Johnson, and the brother of William Henry Vanderbilt. Born on Staten Island, New York, he was in poor health from childhood and never entered the family shipping or railroad businesses, living instead on allowances from his father and on money raised against the family name. When the Commodore died in 1877 leaving him only the income from a small trust while his brother received almost everything, he contested the will in a celebrated New York court battle that ran for more than a year and aired the family's private affairs in the press. The case was settled in 1879, and he died three years later.
The Rothschilds are a European banking dynasty founded in Frankfurt am Main by Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744-1812), whose five sons established banking houses in Frankfurt, Vienna, Naples, London and Paris and together built the most powerful private financial network of the nineteenth century. ## Origins Mayer Amschel Rothschild was born in 1744 in the Judengasse, the walled Jewish street of Frankfurt am Main, where the family took its name from the red shield that had marked an ancestor's house. He began as a dealer in rare coins and medals, became court factor to Crown Prince Wilhelm of Hesse-Kassel in 1769, and turned that position into a banking business handling loans, bullion and government paper. With his wife Gutle Schnapper he had ten children who reached adulthood, five sons and five daughters. ## The five houses Mayer Amschel's decisive act was to place his sons in five cities so that the family could move money and news across borders as a single firm. Amschel Mayer stayed in Frankfurt, Salomon went to Vienna, Nathan to London, Carl to Naples and James to Paris. The brothers financed the allied campaigns against Napoleon, then the governments, railways and industries of nineteenth century Europe. The Naples house closed in 1860 with Italian unification, Frankfurt in 1901 for want of an heir, and Vienna in 1938 after the Anschluss. London and Paris survived, and their successors trade today as Rothschild and Co and the Edmond de Rothschild Group. ## Notable members Nathan Mayer Rothschild founded N M Rothschild and Sons and made London the centre of international lending. His son Lionel broke the bar on Jews sitting in Parliament, taking his Commons seat in 1858, and his grandson Nathan Mayer became the first Jewish member of the House of Lords in 1885. James Mayer de Rothschild dominated French finance under three regimes and bought Chateau Lafite, while his son Edmond funded the first Jewish agricultural settlements in Palestine. The family also produced naturalists and collectors rather than only bankers: Walter, 2nd Baron Rothschild, the zoologist to whom the Balfour Declaration was addressed in 1917; his brother Charles, the flea specialist who founded British nature conservation; Charles's daughter Dame Miriam Rothschild, a Fellow of the Royal Society; and another daughter, Nica, the patron of Thelonious Monk. Jacob, 4th Baron Rothschild, built RIT Capital Partners and chaired the trustees of the National Gallery. ## Significance The Rothschilds were the first banking family to operate as a genuinely international partnership, and for much of the nineteenth century they were the principal lenders to European states. Their name is attached to railways, mines, hospitals, museums, nature reserves, Bordeaux first growths and a long tradition of Jewish philanthropy. Repeated marriages between first cousins kept capital and control inside the family, which is why the branches of this tree cross back into one another so often. | Fact | Details | | --- | --- | | Founder | Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744-1812) | | Matriarch | Gutle Schnapper (1753-1849) | | Origin | The Judengasse, Frankfurt am Main | | Children of the founder | Ten, five sons and five daughters | | The five houses | Frankfurt, Vienna, Naples, London, Paris | | Motto | Concordia, Integritas, Industria | | Principal firms | N M Rothschild and Sons, de Rothschild Freres, S. M. von Rothschild | | Still active today | Rothschild and Co, Edmond de Rothschild Group | | Known for | Government finance, railways, wine estates, natural history, art collections, philanthropy |
The House of Bernadotte is the royal family of Sweden, founded by the French marshal Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, who was elected Swedish crown prince in 1810 and reigned from 1818 as King Charles XIV John, and it has held the throne in an unbroken line ever since, down to King Carl XVI Gustaf, Crown Princess Victoria and Princess Estelle. ## Origins The dynasty began far from Sweden, in the Gascon town of Pau, where Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte was born in 1763 as the son of a provincial lawyer. He rose through the revolutionary French army to become a Marshal of the Empire and Prince of Pontecorvo. In 1810 the Swedish Riksdag, left without an heir after the deposition of Gustav IV Adolf and the accession of the childless Charles XIII, unexpectedly offered the succession to the French marshal. He accepted, converted to Lutheranism, took the name Charles John and in 1818 became king of both Sweden and Norway. His marriage to Desiree Clary, a Marseille merchant's daughter once engaged to Napoleon, produced the dynasty's second king, Oscar I. ## Notable members Oscar I's marriage to Josephine of Leuchtenberg, a granddaughter of the Empress Josephine, brought a descent from Sweden's older royal houses into the line, and Gustaf V's marriage to Victoria of Baden, a great granddaughter of the deposed Gustav IV Adolf, reinforced it. Later generations produced an unusual number of figures known for work outside the court: Prince Eugen, one of Sweden's foremost landscape painters; Gustaf VI Adolf, a working archaeologist and botanist; and Sigvard Bernadotte, an industrial designer. The family's daughters carried the name into the other Scandinavian monarchies and into Belgium: Ingrid became queen of Denmark, Astrid queen of the Belgians and Martha crown princess of Norway, which makes this tree a close relative of the Glucksburg line. ## Significance Under the Bernadottes the Swedish monarchy moved from real political power to a purely ceremonial role, settled by the constitution of 1974. In 1980 Sweden became the first monarchy to adopt full absolute primogeniture, making the infant Crown Princess Victoria heir ahead of her younger brother. Carl XVI Gustaf, who became heir at nine months old and king in 1973, is the longest reigning monarch in Swedish history. Several princes of the house lost their royal titles by marrying commoners and were created Counts of Wisborg by the Grand Duke of Luxembourg, a kinsman through Queen Sophia of Nassau, which is why the Bernadotte name is borne today both by a reigning royal house and by a line of counts. | Fact | Details | | --- | --- | | Family name | House of Bernadotte | | Country | Sweden, and Norway until 1905 | | Founder | Charles XIV John, born Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte (1763 to 1844) | | Reigning since | 1818 | | Monarchs | Charles XIV John, Oscar I, Charles XV, Oscar II, Gustaf V, Gustaf VI Adolf, Carl XVI Gustaf | | Current head | King Carl XVI Gustaf, reigning since 1973 | | Heir apparent | Crown Princess Victoria, Duchess of Vastergotland | | Principal residences | Stockholm Palace, Drottningholm Palace, Haga Palace | | Royal motto | "For Sweden, with the times" (Carl XVI Gustaf) |
The House of Glücksburg is the reigning royal house of Denmark and Norway and the former royal house of Greece, a branch of the ancient House of Oldenburg whose modern members all descend from King Christian IX of Denmark (1818 to 1906) and his wife Louise of Hesse-Kassel. Through the marriages of their six children, a minor ducal family from the Danish-German borderland became the common ancestor of monarchs in Copenhagen, Oslo and Athens, of a British queen consort, of a Russian empress, and of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. ## Origins The house takes its name from Glücksburg, a small castle town in Schleswig, and belongs to the Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg line of the House of Oldenburg, which had held the Danish throne since 1448. Christian IX was a prince of that cadet branch with no expectation of ruling until the childless Frederik VII made the Danish succession an open European question. Christian succeeded him in 1863, and within months his second son was elected King of the Hellenes as George I, planting the family in Greece for 110 years. In 1905 his grandson Prince Carl of Denmark accepted the Norwegian throne as Haakon VII, giving Norway its own dynasty after centuries of union with Denmark and then Sweden. ## Notable members Christian IX was nicknamed the father-in-law of Europe: his daughter Alexandra married Edward VII of the United Kingdom, and his daughter Dagmar became Empress Maria Feodorovna of Russia, mother of Nicholas II. The Danish line runs through Christian X, Frederik IX and Queen Margrethe II, a trained archaeologist and illustrator who reigned from 1972 until her abdication in 2024, to her son King Frederik X and Queen Mary. The Norwegian line runs from Haakon VII and Queen Maud through Olav V, an Olympic sailing champion, to King Harald V and Crown Prince Haakon. The Greek line produced Constantine I, Paul, Constantine II and Queen Anne-Marie, Queen SofÃa of Spain, and Prince Andrew's son Philip, consort to Elizabeth II for 73 years. ## Significance No other western dynasty connects as many surviving monarchies in a single documented lineage. Two of Europe's ten reigning royal families, Denmark and Norway, are Glücksburg in the male line, and the house also sits in the ancestry of the British and Spanish royal families. Its history traces the transformation of European monarchy itself: from the dynastic matchmaking of the 1860s, through the loss of the Russian and Greek thrones, to the constitutional, publicly accountable monarchies of modern Scandinavia. | Fact | Details | | --- | --- | | House name | Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, a branch of the House of Oldenburg | | Founding figure of the modern house | Christian IX of Denmark (1818 to 1906) | | Ancestral seat | Glücksburg Castle, Schleswig | | Thrones held | Denmark (1863 to present), Greece (1863 to 1973), Norway (1905 to present) | | Current heads of state | Frederik X of Denmark, Harald V of Norway | | Best-known member abroad | Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (1921 to 2021) | | Nickname of its founder | The father-in-law of Europe |
Cornelius Vanderbilt III's recorded parents are Cornelius Vanderbilt II, Alice Claypoole Gwynne Vanderbilt.
Cornelius Vanderbilt III has 1 recorded child: Cornelius Vanderbilt IV.
Cornelius Vanderbilt III married Grace Wilson Vanderbilt.
Cornelius Vanderbilt III has 4 recorded siblings: Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt, Gladys Vanderbilt Szechenyi.
Cornelius Vanderbilt III is recorded as Army officer and engineer in the Vanderbilt family tree.
Cornelius Vanderbilt III's recorded native place is New York, New York, United States.
6 ancestors and 1 descendant of Cornelius Vanderbilt III are recorded so far, within a tree of 60 people.
Cornelius Vanderbilt III is recorded as Cornelius Vanderbilt's Great-Grandson.
Cornelius Vanderbilt III is recorded in the Vanderbilt family tree on My rOoOts, alongside 59 other people.
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